After a short delay Australia's Phillip Hughes, left, walks back to the pavilion as Ricky Ponting, 2nd left, looks at umpires Billy Doctrove, 2nd right, and Rudi Koertzen on the fourth day of the second Ashes Test match between England and Australia at Lord's cricket ground in London, Sunday, July 19, 2009. Hughes was caught out by Andrew Strauss off a ball from James Anderson for 17 runs. AP Photo/Tom Hevezi
Now we have Rudi Koertzen, rather bizarrely appointed to umpire in the third Ashes Test at Edgbaston, coming out with a blistering attack on modern players as cheats: “The players will stand there, nick a ball hard and wait for an umpire to make a decision. For me, that’s cheating,” he told Cricinfo.
For me, what this really reveals is that Koertzen is so lacking in confidence about his ability to make correct decisions that he wants the batsman to make the decision for him.
This misses the point about when a batsman makes a mistake entirely.
More often than not, the batsman does not have a clue what has happened, whether he nicked it or not. And it is really up to the umpire to make the correct decision.
Koertzen then goes on to explain that with the Nathan Hauritz catch, both he and umpire Doctrove lost sight of the ball when it lobbed in the air: “the next moment, when I looked around, all I saw were his hands going down. I just thought, ‘I’m not sure whether he caught it.'”
Doctrove, remarkably, missed the flight of the ball, too, and “because we were not sure,” Koertzen went to the video umpire.
For the Strauss catch: “I couldn’t see where the catch was taken because I had the bowler running down the wicket … I didn’t even know who was catching the ball at that stage.”
Koertzen then asked Doctrove whether it was a fair catch and he said, “Yes, it went straight in.”
So Koertzen did not go to the video umpire, despite the fact he had no inkling of whether it was a catch or not, and the other umpire was 40m away.
His savage attack on ‘cheating’ modern players suggests to me that he now thinks he might have been fooled by Strauss’ claiming of the catch that wasn’t.
I argued in an earlier post on this that Koertzen should have been dropped for his failure to adjudicate fairly on the matter of the Strauss ‘catch.’
His comments reinforce this opinion.
Now he seems to be recanting on his behaviour during the Lords Test, which justifies the case for his dropping.
But the ICC has resisted doing the right thing. Koertzen has been given the next Test, which raises the alarming question: Is he really up to umpiring a crucial Ashes Test?
On the evidence so far, the answer must be no.
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